Triggered - The True Crime Podcast

In the early morning hours of June 30, 2009, a black Nissan Sentra was discovered submerged in the water at the Kingston Mills locks in Kingston, Ontario. Inside were four members of the same family: 19-year-old Zainab Shafia, 17-year-old Sahar Shafia, 13-year-old Geeti Shafia, and 52-year-old Rona Mohammad Omar.At first, their deaths appeared to be a horrific accident. But details surrounding the family's trip, damage to a second vehicle, and the increasingly troubling story being told to investigators soon suggested something much darker.This week on Triggered, we’re covering the Shafia family murders, a case that shocked Canada and eventually led to the conviction of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya, and their son Hamed for four counts of first-degree murder. We look at the lives of the four women, what was happening inside the Shafia home before their deaths, how investigators unravelled the case, and the trial that exposed the horrifying motive behind it.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com

Four cryptids and what the evidence actually shows. A sacred lake spirit, an iguana in the trunk of a police cruiser, a Wampanoag story that isn't about a monster, and a movie...or is there more?🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com

In February 2019, a Massachusetts family court judge handed five year old Harmony Montgomery over to a father with a long and violent criminal record. Ten months later she was dead. Nobody noticed for two years.Harmony was blind in one eye and had spent most of her short life moving in and out of foster care. Her mother, Crystal Sorey, had lost custody while struggling with addiction, and when Sorey started pushing for answers in late 2021, she discovered her daughter had never been enrolled in school in New Hampshire. The missing person report was finally filed in December 2021. By then, investigators say, Harmony had been dead since December 7, 2019, killed in the back of a car in Manchester where the family had been living after an eviction.This week we get into how one little girl fell through every crack in two state child welfare systems, what her stepmother Kayla Montgomery told a jury and why Adam Montgomery is back in a New Hampshire courtroom in 2026 after the state Supreme Court overturned his second degree murder conviction and ordered a new trial.Harmony has still never been found.Content warning: this episode discusses the abuse and death of a child.

In July 2017, a woman in Campbell, Ohio went down to her basement for a pound of ground beef. There was a chest freezer down there that belonged to a friend of her husband's, and it had a padlock on it, and whoever installed that padlock had mounted it backwards.Three screws. That's what it took to break open a case that had been running unnoticed for five months.Shannon Graves was 28 years old. She lost her mother young, dropped out of high school, and went back years later to get her GED and put herself through cosmetology school. She was two years into a career she'd built herself, one client at a time. She had a dog she adored and a family she never missed a birthday for.She also had a boyfriend she was preparing to leave, and an apartment, a car, a phone and a benefits card that he was living on.What was discovered in a basement in Ohio will haunt Ash and Chantal forever. Content warning: intimate partner violence, homicide, dismemberment, and the destruction of a body using chemicals. Please take care of yourself.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com

On October 9, 1986, nine year old best friends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway told a neighbour they were heading to Wild Park in Moulsecoomb, Brighton. It was the last time anyone saw them alive. The next afternoon, two civilian searchers found the girls hidden in a makeshift den in the park, and a case that would consume Sussex Police for the next three decades was born.A 20 year old local roofer named Russell Bishop inserted himself into the search from the very beginning, bringing along his terrier and claiming the dog was a highly trained tracker. He was arrested within weeks. And in December 1987, after a four week trial and just two hours of jury deliberation, he walked free.Then, in 1990, he abducted and tried to kill a seven year old girl.This week we walk through the forensic failures that let a child killer go home: the body temperatures nobody recorded, the hand marks never measured, the blood evidence never analysed, and a blue Pinto sweatshirt that the prosecution built its case around and the police failed to preserve. We get into the 2005 double jeopardy reform that cracked the door open, the billion to one DNA match found on evidence taped in 1986 and stored for decades, the 2018 retrial at the Old Bailey, and the girlfriend who lied on the stand in 1987 and finally answered for it in 2021.Bishop died in prison in January 2022. In April 2024, Sussex Police formally apologised for their failings, including the wrongful arrest of Nicola's father.Two families waited 32 years. Here is how they finally got there.Sources include BBC News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Argus, and the published sentencing remarks in R v Bishop and R v Johnson.Content note: this episode discusses the murder and sexual assault of children.Join the Chaos Crew on Discord, and become a Witness or an Accomplice at triggeredthepodcast.com

On the night of September 16, 2009, a 24 year old woman sat down alone at Geoffrey's, an upscale restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She ordered dinner. She could not pay the $89 bill. Staff described her behaviour as strange, and deputies were called.Mitrice Richardson was a Cal State Fullerton graduate. She was warm, brilliant, and by her family's account she had been quietly struggling with her mental health in the weeks before that night. Her father would later say she had bipolar disorder. She was arrested for defrauding an innkeeper, a small amount of marijuana was found in her car, and her car was impounded.At roughly 12:28 in the morning on September 17, she was released from the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. No car. No purse. No phone. No money. She was from West Covina and had no reason to know a single road in that canyon. She walked out into the dark and was never seen alive again.🎧 Listen to Triggered wherever you get your podcasts: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast💬 Join the Chaos Crew (free Discord): https://discord.gg/YuEWjMzkJN ⭐ Become an Inner Circle member on Supercast: triggeredthepod.supercast.com🌐 triggeredthepodcast.com

Michelle Hadley was in her twenties, in grad school, and by her own description sickeningly wholesome. Then she was arrested, held on a million dollars bail, and told she was facing life in prison.The emails threatening her ex fiancé's pregnant wife were real. Sent several times a day, from an account called Lilithistruth, describing what the woman wore to work and where she went. The Craigslist ads inviting strangers to her door were real. The men who showed up were real. The 911 call was real.And every piece of it pointed at Michelle. Including two emails she really had written, months earlier, in her own name, using the same name the stalker was using.She sat in that cell for 88 days saying she'd been set up. Not one person believed her.This week Chantal walks Ashley through the case behind Netflix's A Toxic Love Story, and she starts a long way before the documentary does. With Michelle before any of it. With cameras in a kitchen and a life narrowed to three points on a map. With a woman in a Huntington Beach bar telling a police officer what she does for a living. And with a family in the Arizona desert who found a stranger walking alone, miles from her own car.Content warning: sexual assault allegations, coercive control, staged assaults, and a psychiatric crisis. No graphic detail.Sources include the Orange County District Attorney's Office, the US Department of Justice, filings from the Central District of California, and Netflix's A Toxic Love Story.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast

We grew up outside Pembroke, Ontario, hearing a story adults would only tell in whispers. A daughter. Her boyfriend. A little boy. A farmhouse. And a line that followed the case for fifty-five years: "She should have gone to prison too."We never knew the names. This week, Ash went looking for them.In March 1971, in what was then Alice Township, six-year-old David Witt and his uncle Leslie Molson were murdered. David's mother, Eleanor, survived and testified that she had been held and abused for more than two weeks before the killings. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Catherine Delarge, and Catherine's twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, Lorne Edward Lafrance, were both charged. Lafrance got life. What happened to Catherine is where the public record goes quiet and where a small town's memory took over.This is an episode about what actually happened, and about what happens to the truth when a story gets passed down for half a century.Follow us: linktr.ee/triggeredthepodcast